71.What does the passage mainly talk about?

    A.Internet culture                  B.Electronic mail message.

    C.Fahlman’s creation.                D.Online smiley face.

E

    The case for college has been accepted without question for more than a generation. All high school graduates ought to go, because college will help them earn more money, become“better”people, and learn to be more responsible citizens than those who don’t go.

    But college has never been able to work its magic for everyone. And now that close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who don’t fit the pattern are becoming more and more, and more obvious. College graduates are selling shoes and driving taxis; college students get in the way of each other’s experiments and write false letters of recommendation in the competition for admission to graduate school. Others find not interest in their studies, and drop out-often encouraged by college administrators.         

Some observers say the fault is with the young people themselves-they are spoiled and they are expecting too much. But that is a condemnaiton(谴责)of the students as a whole, and does not explain all campus unhappiness. Others blame the state of the world, and they are partly right. We’ve been told that young people have to go to college because our economy cannot take in an army of untrained eighteen-year-olds. But disappointed graduates are learning that it can no longer take in an army of trained twenty-two-year-olds, either.

    Some adventuresome educators and campus watchers have openly begun to suggest that college may not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person after the completion of high school. We may have been looking at all those surveys upside down, it seems, and thinking of the rosy glow of our own remembered college experiences. Perhaps college does not make people intelligent(clever),ambitious, happy, liberal, or quick to learn things-maybe it is just the other way round, and intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-learning people are only the ones who have been attracted to college in the first place. And perhaps all those successful college graduates would have been successful whether they had gone to college or not. This is heresy(异端邪说)to those of us who have been brought up to believe that if a little schooling is good, more has to be much better. But opposite evidence is beginning to mount up.

68.The underlined word“cutting-edge”in the second paragraph probably means    .

   A. most advanced            B. between two subjects

   C. on the edge of a subject        D. having sharp point

    D

All over the country these days, electronic mail messages are ending with this strange little mark:-) or one of its many variants(变体),like :-(.

    It was 20 years ago that Scott Fahlman taught the Net how to smile. The Carnegie Mellon computer scientist has devoted his life to man-made intelligence, the practice of teaching computers how to think like humans, but the bearded scientist is perhaps best known for a flash of inspiration that helped to define Internet culture.

    By the early 1980’s the Computer Science group at Carnegie Mellon was making heavy use of online bulletin boards or“bboards”.A good many of the posts were humorous. The problem was that if someone made a humorous remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke. This problem caused some people to suggest(only half seriously)that maybe it would be a good idea to clearly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or the tone of voice that communicates this information when we talk in person or on the phone.

    So on Sept. 19, 1982, Fahlman typed :-) in an online message. “I had no idea I was starting something that would soon pollute all the world’s communications channels,” he wrote later. The“smiley face”has since become common in online communication, allowing 12-year-old girls and corporate lawyers alike to mark their messages with a quick symbol that says, “Hey, I’m only joking.”

    This creation caught on quickly around Carnegie Mellon, and soon spread to other universities and research labs by means of the computer networks of the day. Since then, the smiling icons(marks)have taken the e-mail world by storm. Now called emoticons, short for emotive icons, Fahlman’s smiley face encouraged the creation of thousands of variants.

    Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online all put emoticons into their instant-messaging systems, while telecom companies, jewelry makers and online merchants have sent in trademark applications for products and ads that include Fahlman’s smiley face.

    But Fahlman has never seen a cent from his creation.“If it cost people a cent to use it, nobody would have used it. This is my little gift to the world, for better or worse,”he said.

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